The high cost of attracting teachers

Sunday

Mar 5, 2017 at 2:53 PM

By Ben Christopher CALmatters

Rizi Manzon is a teacher, so naturally, he has a lot to worry about: a stack of homework assignments to grade, a week’s worth of culinary arts classes to prepare for, kitchen supplies to purchase on his own time and dime. And the assorted crises, dramas and anxieties of the 36 teenagers in his care at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara.

But unlike most public school educators in Silicon Valley, one thing Manzon doesn’t need to worry about is how he’s going to pay rent this month.

Instead, as one of Santa Clara Unified School District’s 822 teachers and specialists, he is one of the lucky few who get to call “Casa del Maestro” home. A picturesque plot of 70 suburban townhouses, bracketed by cherry blossoms and palm trees, this is the district’s answer to the Bay Area’s affordable housing crisis. To lure qualified teachers, the district provides below-market housing located on district property to new employees for up to seven years — if they can score a spot.

For teachers like Manzon, who gave up a career as a chef in Orange County to take the job at Wilcox, the move probably wouldn’t have penciled out without the district’s generous subsidized digs.

“It would have been a hard sell for sure,” he says. “I would have had to come to terms with living in Gilroy.”

No offense to Gilroy. But along with the stresses of the job, not to mention Manzon’s personal challenges — he’s a veteran who “did some time in the sandbox” in Iraq and lives with his emotional support animal, Koa — a twice-daily hour-long commute, along with the familiar angst of finding housing in the Bay Area on a teacher’s salary, are extra stressors he’s happy to do without.

Casa del Maestro, a radical experiment in teacher recruitment and retainment, is due to celebrate its 15th anniversary this year. But as school districts in the state’s pricey coastal enclaves struggle to attract and keep qualified teachers, many are considering Santa Clara’s “if you build it, they will come” model to teacher retainment.

And now they have the support of Sacramento.

Last fall, the governor signed the “Teacher Housing Act of 2016” to make it easier for school districts to get into the landlording business. Authored by Mark Leno, the former Democratic state senator from San Francisco, the law gives districts explicit permission to set aside housing exclusively for its employees and, crucially, to take advantage of state and federal low-income housing tax credits to develop these projects. Under prior law, projects that make use of these low-income housing subsidies had to be open to all tenants who met the income guidelines, to prevent public funds from subsidizing housing discrimination. The new law makes an exception for teachers and district employees.

For the state, extending those tax credits to school employees is a zero-sum game — it designates a fixed amount for the program. What it does mean, however, is less money for other low-income people who would otherwise take advantage such subsidies.

Not everyone, of course, agrees that teachers should be the focal point of affordable housing policy. In areas where the supply of housing is constrained, providing special access to teachers necessarily comes at the expense of others who are just as inconvenienced by high rents and long commutes, if not more so.

“I’m a teacher, so I love teachers. But this pick and choose mentality about professions that we value and professions that we don’t seems kind of crazy,” said Paavo Monkkonen, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. “We don’t want to allow all our service workers to live near us — just the ones we deem more ‘acceptable’ and more ‘meritorious.’ ”

But for many lawmakers, it’s an appealing way to kill two birds with one stone: tackle affordable housing while simultaneously addressing the teacher shortage plaguing California districts.

“There’s a lot of interest in doing this now given the conflux of rapidly increasing housing prices coupled with a growing teacher shortage in so many districts” said Jeff Vincent, the deputy director and cofounder of the Center for Cities & Schools at the University of California, Berkeley. “And those things are clearly related.”

A recent survey by the Learning Policy Institute and the California School Boards Association found three-quarters of public schools across the state reported being unable to fill all of their teachers positions with qualified, credentialed faculty.

That comes at a cost for students — particularly those who attend schools serving mostly low-income households, where turnover is highest. But the cost also is financial. According to a report by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, Los Angeles Unified School District pays an additional $94 million per year in recruitment, hiring and training costs just to keep up with staff attrition. In San Francisco, the annual price tag is more than $11 million, and in Oakland, its $12 million.

The academic literature is equivocal about the connection between the cost of housing and teacher turnover.

“We know that teachers who are in schools with higher compensation are more likely to stay,” said Anne Podolsky, a policy analyst at the Learning Policy Institute. “So if you think about housing incentives as just one form of compensation, we might have reason to believe that that would be associated with teachers who are going to stay in their schools longer.”

Podolsky points to a national survey which found that 1 in 4 former teachers said that they would consider returning to the profession if offered housing incentives.

But it’s clear that low-income housing tax credits — the affordable housing subsidies that the Teaching Housing Act now allows districts and their co-developers to draw from — are finite. Last year, the State Treasurer’s Office received 163 qualifying applications for its competitive low-income housing tax credit, but had the resources to fund only 82 of them.

And it’s not even clear that most teachers would qualify for subsidized units. According to Mark Stivers, who heads the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee at the Treasurer’s Office, the rents charged at complexes constructed or renovated with low-income tax credit support range from 30 percent to 60 percent of an area’s median income. That puts the upper-income threshold in a city such as San Francisco at $45,250 for one person. Certainly, some teachers make less than this, but the district’s average salary is $67,537.

Given the complexities, costs and delays associated with constructing housing specifically for teachers, there’s an obvious question: “Why not pay them more?” Monkkonen said. “That would be the easier thing to do.”